The Liminal Stage

Navigating a modern world with the help of time-tested traditions

What is a Liminal Stage?

Liminal stages are psychological thresholds, times of transition when we stand “betwixt and between” one state and another. The biggies are birth, marriage, death-cultures develop splashy rituals around these transitions to ease the anxiety they provoke. For the smaller, but significant, crossroads we traverse every day, I offer the celebrations, superstitions, and coping mechanisms found in this blog.

Well, it’s the End Times. Which explains why I’m having so many revelations lately. Maybe that’s a little dramatic. I’m fairly confident it’s not the end of the world. But it is the end of our time in Miami. See, on Monday we move back to New York, after three years in Miami Beach. And […]

Yesterday morning, while 64-year-old Diana Nyad was swimming from Cuba to Florida without the protection of a shark cage, succeeding, on her fifth attempt, in becoming the first person to do so, my 52-year-old cousin Spyro Economou had a massive heart attack at his home and died in the ambulance on the way to the […]

When Amalía gets tired, she turns to me or her father and says “go to casita.” She knows the word “home,” but it’s not exactly what she intends to say. Casita means “little house,” but it doesn’t refer to size in this case (although it’s true, Amalía has never spent more than a few nights […]

After a whirlwind three weeks of weddings (my cousin’s on the Peloponnesian coast), ruins (the Byzantine city of Butrint in what is now Albania), and beaches (too numerous to mention), I thought we’d end our annual trip to Greece with a few relaxing days in Lia, the quiet village where my father was born, which […]

When I walked into this bathroom this morning and saw the dying cockroach, flailing it’s little feelers and all six legs, that’s when I knew I needed an exorcism. I know what you’re thinking: an exorcism is a bit of an overreaction. Surely some Raid would do the trick? But the cockroach was just the […]

When I wrote my first novel, Other Waters, I was a graduate student in the Writing Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, so I had the benefit of hearing lots and lots of other people’s opinions about my work. The core of the program was the workshop, a weekly seminar in which you […]

Speaking Engagements

Did you notice I like to travel? I’ve given over 90 talks and readings about North of Ithaka and Other Waters at venues ranging from bookstores in Greece to archaeological conferences in Chicago. If you or your book club or organization would like to contact me about discussing The Ladies of Managua, or any of my books, please visit the Talks page on this site.

More on Nicaragua

Please visit the Articles page of this site for links to some of my travel writing about Nicaragua, Miami, and Greece (and a few other spots as well) for publications including Travel+Leisure, T, The New York Times' travel magazine, Town&Country Travel, and Budget Travel, among others. And check out my blog, the Liminal Stage, for musings on, and nostalgia for, my homeland and my homeland by marriage.

breaking news: The first review of my upcoming novel is in! Kirkus Reviews calls The Ladies of Managua, "a story about the revolutionary lives women make for themselves out of necessity, out of commitment, out of passion," and says the novel "begs to be filmed." It will be published by St. Martin's Press on May 5th, 2015, just in time for Mother's Day and is available for pre-order now! Events are planned in New York; Brookline, MA; New Orleans; and Miami; check out the Talks page for details.

breaking news: I'm expecting! My upcoming novel, The Ladies of Managua, will be published by St. Martin's Press on May 5th, 2015, just in time for Mother's Day. It's about three generations of women, each with her own secret, who are forced to confront their complicated relationships to each other, and to their country, Nicaragua. And it's available for pre-prder now!